Well, this is not a very technical post about something, but it's on something that I have learned or come to know in recent times.
The two major contributing factors in the growth of computer science were war and growth in science.
Lately, I have been doing some studying and reading a bit about World War 2 and what happened, and I got to know how electronics and computing machines played a very important role in the war. If you know about Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, there was a lot of computation needed to make up an atomic bomb. Physicists were not good at doing all of these calculations, so the work for it fell to people who knew physics and programming at the same time. It was at that time that people like von Neumann contributed highly to the projects; with his help, they were able to significantly help the team of the ENIAC computer. Afterward, he helped them design EDVAC's new logical design, now called the von Neumann architecture, which we all know is the basis for all the computers of today.
Well, if you trace back, von Neumann took inspiration from Alan Turing, whom he met at one point. Turing is another genius whom fewer people know about, who helped the Allied powers crack the Enigma code, which was the most complex encryption machine the Germans made. And according to sources, he made this machine called the Bombe, which was the literal machine that cracked the Enigma machine. Apparently, with the help of this, Alan Turing indirectly reduced the war by 2 years, and nobody knew how it was happening precisely. At that time, he already worked on his concept of the Turing machine, which was an abstract concept that formed the basis for all Computer Science and AI.
Turing went on to prove the existence of a Universal Turing Machine: a single machine which was capable of simulating any other Turing Machine by reading its program as input. This fundamentally invented the programmable computer, since it showed that a single machine could perform any of a number of tasks simply by modifying its instructions, not its hardware.
Turing asked the question "Can machines think?" and proposed what became known as the Turing Test.
The combination of computability theory-what can be computed-and the question of machine thinking-how computers might exhibit intelligence-established the theoretical and philosophical basis on which the whole of computer science and AI were founded. Although born in such a warlike setting, these breakthroughs reach far beyond the fields of battle. Ideas forged by individuals like Turing and von Neumann created frameworks that each modern computer and AI system still follows to this day. What is remarkable is how problems once approached with the urgency of war came to define this peaceful technological world we take for granted. Understanding this history makes the evolution of computer science feel much more like a narrative about how human pressure, intellect, and circumstance shaped the founding moments of an entire field.
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